So fun in the beginning: every night.
Pleasure’s grandeur sewn into hours
like the stitching on a child’s toy, tight,
soft against the pressure of open mouths.

Then on and fucking on, twisting each
yarn to morning, words holding place
of action. My skin vamping for touch.
Months ago if you asked what I ached

for, it would have been this: to know
you’d trip on what fell from my lips
each evening, my stories turning slow,
time swaddling my neck like an ellipsis.

Annaka Saari is a writer from Michigan. She earned her MFA from Boston University, where she now works as the administrator for the Creative Writing Program. She also serves as managing editor for Solstice Literary Magazine and a poetry reader for The Los Angeles Review. The recipient of a Florence Engel Randall Graduate Fiction Prize and a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship, her work has been named a finalist for the Prufer Poetry Prize, longlisted for the DISQUIET Literary Prize, and appeared in or is forthcoming in The Southern Review, Pleiades, Image, Cleveland Review of Books, and elsewhere. Her website is  annakasaari.com.